Sweet Heart Sweet Light

Fat Possum; 2012

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Since the release of Spiritualized's last album, 2008's Songs in A&E, band leader Jason Pierce went on a nostalgic detour. The frontman has always weaved rock'n'roll history into his tunes, but this was different. The last few years saw Pierce reissuing his defining 1997 monument Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space as a boxed set and playing the grandiose album in full at a handful of memorable shows. The redux was a welcome reminder of that album's strung-out, gospel-blues magnificence; Ladies and Gentlemen aimed for the heavens, always, and reached them more often than not. But it also reminded us of how his ensuing three albums haven't quite stacked up, how his psychedelic take on early rock may have nowhere else to go. As he told me earlier this year, revisiting his past masterpiece had Pierce thinking: "If I'm going to make new music now, it better be fucking good."

Sweet Heart Sweet Light fits that description. Yet it's not a drastic transformation as much as an acute refinement. Pierce is still using large orchestras and choirs to take his Robert Johnson blues way past the crossroads, to vistas that are as endless as they are empty. He's still singing his own rock'n'roll gospel: Jesus, fast cars, girls named Jane and Mary, pimps, death, fire, freedom, and God all show up, giving life to Pierce's alternate-universe Eden, inhabited by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, self-loathing, and a spitty syringe. He's still his own genre-- this tiny voice elevated by the super-church-sized arrangements in his head. "I want to make music that catches all the glory and beauty and magnificence, but also the intimacy and fragility, all within the space of the same 10 seconds," Pierce has said. It's a mad goal. But it's also an inherently intriguing and universal one, just as ancient myths or Biblical tales can be. Pierce isn't religious, but he uses Christian language and figures as a thematic shorthand. "As you have a conversation about Jesus, you know you're talking to him about how it is to be fallible and question yourself and your morals," he told me. "When I sing, 'Help me, Jesus,' you know I'm not asking for help fixing the fucking car." Such an all-or-nothing attitude is risky, but that's the whole point.

Pierce mixed Sweet Heart over eight drawn-out months under something of a drug-induced stupor. But it wasn't the kind of drug-induced stupor Pierce is known for. At the time, he was being hit with experimental chemotherapy treatments to combat a degenerative liver disease. (Three doctors are thanked in the liner notes; Pierce is apparently OK now.) During this album's creation, the singer referred to it as Huh?-- a nod to his jumbled mental state. All of which would make one assume that Sweet Heart would be messy, fucked-up, and completely depressing. That is not the case. This is probably the most uplifting album of his career.

Relatively speaking, that is. "Sometimes I wish that I was dead," he sings on "Little Girl", "'Cause only the living can feel the pain." Safe to say: Jason Pierce will not be singing next to Big Bird on "Sesame Street" anytime soon. This is an end-of-your-rope, nothing-left-to-lose kind of comfort marked by equal doses of fierce distortion and sentimental strings. And there's more reflection here, too. "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away," he famously sang, starkly vulnerable, on Ladies and Gentlemen's title track. Here, though, he's more considered. On the lovelorn ballad "Too Late", most of the movie-score violins drop out as Pierce sighs out the kind of profundity perhaps only age can offer: "This is dedicated baby, what more can I say?/ I won't love you more than I love you today/ And I won't love you less, but I've made my mistakes/ Stay away from love dear if that's what it takes." Naturally, he doesn't take his own advice and can't help but fall in love on the track anyway. But the disclaimer adds another layer to Pierce's from-the-vein emoting.

This wiser perspective is also found on the nine-minute first single "Hey Jane", where the titular rock'n'roll hellion is given some shade. Though the song's narrator is taken with the fast-living Jane, he "ain't got time to waste my time with you," too. Meanwhile, the music piles up into a car crash before returning as a sky-bound motorik pulse, like a Cadillac going 110 straight into the atmosphere. The scathing "Get What You Deserve" pairs "Kashmir"-like strings with what sounds like a guitar being popped in and out of its socket as Pierce offers a biting critique of rock'n'roll excess (and, by extension, the entire capitalist enterprise). "Gonna shoot you while you're laying still/ I lost all of my emotion," he sings, taking the role of too-far-gone rock star/hedge-fund manager/corrupt politician, while the song's nagging dissonance suggests a chaos just beneath the surface.

Similarly, Pierce uses his deadpan to great effect as he casually dismisses the whole lot of humanity on the tremendous "Headin' for the Top Now": "In our haste to find a little more from life/ We didn't notice that we'd died." Once again, not too life-affirming on paper. But the song's mash of angry feedback and a rumbling juke-joint piano/bass/drum backbone locates the unpredictable excitement of our collective folly. The song's outro, which has Pierce's 11-year-old daughter Poppy singing of pimps and hustlers in a rhyme reminiscent of "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary", only adds to the bizarre (and bizarrely joyful) disorientation.

So it makes strange sense that this exhilarating album about death and destruction should end with "So Long You Pretty Thing". The title references Bowie's glam-generation anthem "Oh! You Pretty Things", but this is no simple tribute. It's a eulogy to those classic rock'n'roll dreams, as Pierce sings over and over: "So long you pretty thing, God save your little soul/ The music that you played so hard ain't on your radio/ And all your dreams of diamond rings, and all that rock'n'roll can bring you/ Sail on, so long." Which, coming from this 46-year-old who's never exactly set the charts ablaze, sounds like a terrible finale. And yet, backed by that choir and those horns, this is the finest, most enduring refrain Pierce has ever written-- a goodbye you never want to end.